Tuesday, 17 January 2012

The Hitcher (1986)

Ranking, purely on a level of sustained
moodiness and visual authority, with the best of ‘80s American genre films, The Hitcher is nonetheless a frustrating
piece of work. The Hitcher operates
best as a waking nightmare, as the situation depicted in the opening scenes,
and the blue-eyed malevolence personified by John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), seem to
practically step out of a Jungian collective unconscious, grown cancer-like in
the modern psyche where fear is the flipside to the nominal freedom of the highway, and the film itself a bleak inversion of late ‘60s and ‘70s road movies,
which already displayed aspects of paranoia about just how open and bounteous
being on the road would prove. Young Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), beset by micro-sleep
blackouts as he travels a desolate stretch of road in Nevada, picks up
hitch-hiker Ryder, because, as he will explain later, he thinks a companion
will help keep him awake. Ryder, emerging from the pouring rain and offering a
peculiarly distracted line of patter, certainly wakes Jim up, not merely from
driver fatigue, but from his hitherto cushioned urban upbringing and coddled
sense of the world: he’s recently left Chicago for an adventure, having signed
up with a pick-up driving service purely to get a vehicle to take to
California, and Jim is from the first instant a naïve young man waiting for a
shock. The first half-hour of The Hitcher
is as good as any thriller ever made, generating a mood of lonely fatigue and
lurking horror with fervent excellence, the images of red taillights soaking
the rainy night with bloody tones sufficient to evoke the truth behind Ryder’s
claim that he cut off a Volkswagen driver’s extremities, even before he pulls
out his flick knife. Hauer’s sublime performance sustains a tone of bleary
existential despair and psychic exhaustion even in feeding off fear and mayhem.

The visual pungency of the rainy night
and the subsequent minimalist vistas of desert and dusty diners and lonely truck stops, conveyed with crisp yet muted colours, and
methodical lighting and sound layers, make The
Hitcher’s landscape authentic yet estranged, a richly atmospheric
battleground that works well as both realistic milieu and Dali-esque
dreamscape. It’s as bleakly interiorised and relentless in its study of the
vulcanisation of a young man’s soul through torment in the face of the world’s
evil as the same year’s similar Blue
Velvet, and like that film hinges on telling images of severed body parts.
Of more immediate kinship, it anticipates the same ethereal sense of the
Midwestern night as a nightmarish cage in its vastness, populated by strange
beasts, in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark(1987),
likewise written by Eric Red, who must count as co-auteur on both films, which
also share some essential faults. Director Robert Harmon’s work wears
influences on its sleeve whilst maintaining a patina of consistent stylisation,
with loud hints of Hitchcock and Paul Verhoeven, unsurprising with Verhoeven’s
former golden boy Hauer on board. The
Fourth Man’s image of a punctured eyeball is invoked through dialogue, and
whether or not the villain is a demon or a mere murderer is left similarly
opaque. The Hitcher also belongs in a
class of new-age horror film with Michael Mann’s more oblique but similarly oppressive
attempt to reinvent the gothic horror film with The Keep (1984), particularly in how Harmon uses Mark Isham’s
spacey score like Mann used Tangerine Dream’s, to sustain the miasma of
paranoid isolation and hazy veracity.

Intimations of anticipated violation
take on other dimensions as Ryder keeps the knife pressed in Jim’s crotch as
they’re pulled over by a road worker, who takes the gesture for a queer
rendezvous. Like another mid-‘80s horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, the seemingly inhuman killer provokes
voluble metaphors for gay panic, as the threat of homoerotic violence lends a
note of queasy knowing to Jim’s near-psychic link to Ryder and his actions
during their absurdist chase. Ryder seems to embody an entrapping fact of
identity that cannot be escaped, and certainly coming along when Jim is
vulnerable and in the act of escaping his familiar life. Jim’s refusal to
submit, that is, to complete Ryder’s dictated statement, “I want to die”, makes
him the top, and Ryder, who seems to be devoutly wishing a consummation,
nominates Jim not as victim but as nemesis, the one who must finally grow big
enough balls to take him out, whatever the potential cost, as he provokes Jim
at several points to kill him. Ryder begins exterminating everyone Jim gets
close to, from policemen to holidaying families. The Hitcher suggests a Halloween campfire tale effectively
illustrated, borrowing tropes familiar from urban legends: food spiked with
nasty surprises; situations of solitude inviting the unknown danger. Whilst the
opening and basic set-up seem to promise a focused set-piece built around an
interpersonal cat-and-mouse struggle, a la Ida Lupino’s spin on the same idea, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), hewing to
classic noir rules, or a The Twilight
Zone-esque tale of the uncanny and the dissolving limits of the liminal,
Harmon and Red soon move on to a Hitchcockian manhunt, albeit played by the far
more expansive rules of ‘80s genre stylings, where infrastructure has to be
totalled, guns fired aplenty, and explosions set off now and then.

Even as it shifts gears and genres, The Hitcher still maintains integrity
and a compelling aura of dread, as Jim’s own cranking hysteria and will to
survive begin to incriminate him as surely as Ryder’s mischievous murders. Relief
for the folie-a-deux that is the
Jim/Ryder death dance is introduced in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s
winningly blowsy diner waitress Nash, taking Jim under her wing eventually, as
the promise of violent force from the cops proves as unnervingly extreme as any
highway psychopathy, and the couple are conjoined by their wish to escape their
lives: just as Jim’s rebellion brings on Ryder, so too Nash’s rebellion brings
on the police with white-hot fury, which won’t abate until she is killed. References
to Duel (1971) are hard to avoid,
especially in the hero’s ordinary haplessness and the villain’s relentlessness,
the use of setting, and the general story structure. Hitchcock is the common
reference for both Spielberg and Harmon, with a helicopter swooping in like North by Northwest’s crop duster, on top
of the transference of guilt theme. The problem with Harmon’s film is that
whilst it hints at hallucinogenic fantasy, it doesn’t ever quite make up its
mind, pursuing the basic narrative conceit with an increasingly improbable
narrative that nonetheless never entirely gives into dream logic. The fact is
that Red’s script under the influence of a much more recent genre model,
becoming a variation on The Terminator
(1984: James Cameron would of course produce wife Bigelow’s film of Red’s next
script) with unstated supernatural or psychological causes, rather than sci-fi,
to justify the Ryder’s inhuman capacity to shoot down said helicopter with a
handgun, or plunge out of a bus and through a windscreen with barely a
scratch.

This attempt to blend the hyperkinetic
high style that defined ‘80s American genre cinema with a tale based more in
primal dread and near-subliminal anxieties therefore only works to a certain
extent, as Harmon therefore sustains a note of cryptic but essentially earthy
urgency. Then again, the film also bears similarities of vision with the
following year’s White of the Eye by
Donald Cammell, another tale based in versions of normality based in both
everyday life and the templates of genre, increasingly untethered from both
whilst invoking destructive forces in a desert setting. On a level of basic
compulsive action, too, The Hitcher
commits itself with admirably coldness to its singularly nasty proliferation of
tricks, from the finger plucked and almost eaten from a plate of French Fries,
to Jim awakening in a police station where he’s been imprisoned only to find
the cops have all been murdered and the police dog lapping blood from its
master’s neck. Most memorably and inescapably nasty, Nash, taken prisoner by
Ryder, is suspended between two trucks, to be torn in half with the slightest
release of the clutch, forestalling both Jim’s and the police’s hopes of
delivering cost-free justice. Disgusted with Jim’s squeamishness and incapacity
to kill his nemesis, Ryder exasperatedly lets the truck roll forward, killing Nash, a moment of
chilling nihilism that vibrates within and around the work: it’s the rare
horror film that has the courage of such taunting convictions to do such a
thing to the nominal love interest. Interestingly, The Hitcher made a powerful impact at the time thanks to its intimate cruelty, yet it's actually very judicious in terms of what it shows: such unbearable spectacles as a slaughtered cute family and Nash's murder are actually left entirely to the imagination, and become perhaps all the more powerful for it. Many, far more gory films have been made before and since, and yet there's something about The Hitcher's precise malevolence in this regard that makes it especially galvanising by refusing to play nice.

Still, killing off Nash only points to a
basic flaw in Red’s script, one he would at least not repeat in Near Dark (which similarly stumbles
towards the end with action movie shtick but recovers with a better finish). In wanting to stay a step ahead of the audience and cut off all familiar
avenues, Red and Harmon leave their film without any real source of suspense in the last
act, which, on top of the film’s wilful abandonment of believability, finally
proves a ruinous drag. The essential point of The Hitcher is an interesting one,
however, in that it seems to boil down to a depiction of achieving final
maturity, an evolution which requires, sometimes, taking responsibility for unpleasant, even terrible
jobs; it's a variation on “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” but inflected
with an existential quality where, whether you win or lose in the war against fear itself, it costs you something dear to
you. After Jim struggles through a Calvary-like moment where he contemplates
suicide with a stolen police pistol, he once again chooses life. But
life now means, therefore, accepting the persecution of Ryder and by the police as his new state of existence. Jim's
unwillingness to shoot Ryder when he gives him the chance, and when he might have a
shot at saving Nash, has a definite consequence: it means that Ryder, who has no concept of mercy, kills her, thus forcing Jim to be morally complicit in the act through his incapacity to meet monstrosity on its own terms. By The Hitcher’s end, however, Jim is
as dead-eyed and relentless as Ryder, if still ostensibly righteous, when he
turfs out Jeffrey DeMunn’s empathetic sheriff from his own squad car to chase
down Ryder who, as predicted, stages an escape from a prison bus. The very
finale gives the impression of a narrative motor finally running down for lack
of petrol, no more twists or new revelations possible, as the binary necessity
finally fulfilled, the traditional Reagan-era movie act of punitive punishment
blended with an aspect of mercy killing, as well as self-exterminating
consummation that looks forward to the bullet-induced cure for schizophrenia in
Fight Club (1999). Even if it slowly
degenerates into a lesser film than it might have been through trying to be too
many kinds of movie, The Hitcher’s
perfect first act and memorably ruthless highlights sustain an impressive and
oddly haunting semi-classic. Sadly, Harmon's subsequent cinematic career, including his return to semi-abstract urban legend horror with They (2002) and Highwaymen (2004), has been disappointing, but his interesting telemovie work has included 2000's The Crossing, perhaps the best attempt to film the American Revolution made thus far.

5 comments:

Nice review. While I certainly won't dispute the film's flaws I think that Hauer's blistering performance transcends them by sheer force of will. He is such a monstrous/boogeyman-esque presence in the film that I think the film does work as some kind of waking nightmare. One could easily imagine the entire film taking place during one of Jim's nodding offs while on the road.

This is one of those films that had a notorious rep when I was young and seeing it was almost a rite of passage because it had such a rep for being a scary as hell film. It still gives me chills, esp. the first bit where its just Hauer and Howell.

I wonder if perhaps NEAR DARK is a stronger film is because Kathryn Bigelow is a better director than Harmon and probably had some input on the script. I know the cast did improvise certain bits during the film and I'm sure that made a difference in the end result.

"One could easily imagine the entire film taking place during one of Jim's nodding offs while on the road."

I think, J.D., that's very much the point, and that the filmmakers veered away from making it explicit it at their own cost; it could have been the best variation on that idea kind of idea since The Women in the Window. But in the end they chose not to offend their target audience which would have kicked and moaned at such a trick. As it is the film essentially stumble to a well-staged but essentially weakly conceived finish that underlines how much the film needs a stronger sense of definition for the drama we've seen. Of course, I suppose it's possible to argue that the film's potency lies in precisely the fact that Ryder remains undefined - I'm certainly glad they didn't pull any outright supernatural pizzazz - but finally I feel that as it is the film finishes up feeling confused about what sort of movie it finally is, and a little bit hamstrung by its own commercial expectations.

In any event, Hauer's effortless grasp on the character of Ryder - he seems a million years old in spirit, and his viciousness has a uniquely exasperated, almost bored quality to it rather than the usual gloating psycho - imbue it with hints of depth far beyond what it probably would be otherwise. I'm sure what you say is probably correct about Near Dark, although I think Harmon showed a lot of talent here that might have proved Bigelow's equal, because to a very great extent his direction holds the film together when the script stumbles. But Near Dark's script was already more complex, mature and layered; it has that advantage of starting off as far more rich.

You make some good points. yet another interpretation is that Jim is schizophrenic and actually he committed all the murders depicted in the film but created the Ryder persona in his mind in order to justify it all.